Once again, the International Conclusion-Jumping Championships are being held, and once again the topic is our own B. Lamar Bonds. So let's begin. Oh, and tie your shoes.

Item One: "The government must have a very strong case to bother indicting him."

Maybe. And maybe not.

This is not going to be an easy case to make in this town with a jury pool that could include a Giants fan, a libertarian or just an ornery cuss who distrusts the government in general. It certainly isn't going to be easy to make without his onetime personal trainer, Greg Anderson, and ... well, let's go to ...

Item Two: "Anderson flipped."

Sure doesn't look like it, despite the circumstantial evidence of him being freed while the indictment was still warm from the printer. Anderson had to be released once Bonds was indicted on the five perjury and obstruction of justice charges, so his release says nothing about whether he cooperated with the government. In fact, every indication is that he spilled nothing.

Item Three: "Bonds will try to plead this out to avoid jail time."

Sure doesn't seem like the Bonds we know, and without Anderson as the slam-dunk witness, sure doesn't sound like the kind of legal advice he would follow. Plus, the feds have spent too much time on this to settle for a jail-less plea. This is almost surely going to trial, where the blood sport will be on display on every channel this side of the NHL Network.

Item Four: "Conclusions can be drawn from the Michael Vick dogfighting case in Virginia."

No, the far better parallel is the Marion Jones case, because of her own connections to BALCO. Michael Vick's connection to the Bonds case is that he was indicted by a federal grand jury in the same calendar year, and his decision to plead guilty was strongly predicated on the decision of his accomplices to cooperate with the feds. Unless Anderson did in fact roll, which is pretty well discounted now, that doesn't seem to be the case here.

Item Five: "Major League Baseball must have the goods on Bonds for the feds to have positive drug tests from Bonds."

There are tests Victor Conte did on Bonds while he was at BALCO that the feds gained access to in its original raid and subsequent warrants, and the positive tests referred to in the indictment were almost surely those. What MLB does or doesn't have remains a question, but the league didn't necessarily have to be connected to this case.

Did you forget Muhammad Ali fighting in the mid-'60s for the right to have his religious draft deferment honored and his ability to box restored? That case affected thousands of young men in the Vietnam era. This is fascinating stuff we have before us, but like so much else about the Bonds story, it affects Bonds alone. It's a case about lying, not a stand on a universal principle.

But if you do want a conclusion you can jump to, it is that Bonds is retired from baseball, whether he likes it or not.

The five-count indictment blows so many holes in Bonds' desirability to other teams that it is unfathomable that another team would be willing to sign him, either in December, March, June or ever. Never mind whether he is still a salable commodity to the average fan - no team is going to sign someone who might have to take a few weeks off during the middle of the 2008 season to go on trial. Even the most benign viewing of the events of today undercuts Bonds' ability to make himself attractive to another team. His new uniform is a suit, his support staff is John Burris and Michael Rains, and 762 is the home run record for the foreseeable future.

Everything else you think you know, you probably don't. At least not yet. There is much to be revealed, and only if the feds are as forthcoming about their evidence package as the prosecutors in the Vick case were. Those dots were provided and connected in exhaustive and damning detail even before the trial was scheduled, so much so that Vick pleaded guilty rather than go to court.

The questions surrounding the Bonds case remain more open than you, I or the feral punditocracy thinks. We have just gotten started.

And finally, there is one last conclusion not to be jumped. That with Bonds indicted, the Steroid Era is finally behind us, and baseball can dance free and untainted. No, it's in front of us, halogen high-beams right through our corneas, and it's going to stay in front of us for at least as long as it took for the drugs to become a full-blown era.

No player can be presumed to be clean on his say-so or the lack of a positive test administered by those crack scientists working for MLB. The presumption of innocence works in a courtroom but nowhere else in our judgmental society. We conclusion-jump because we have too much time on our hands and too much media to allow for the dead air required to reconfirm baseball's chemical virtue.